Where is the Exxon Valdez today?

More of the story of EVOS

Knox Village Soup Citizen
April 6, 2005

http://rockland.villagesoup.com/AandE/story.cfm?storyID=53259

Stephen Olson: The double-cross

A good friend who I'll call "Jack" for the purposes of this story turned up last week, looking tanned and fit.

"What are you doing home?" I asked.

He'd just left for his usual 60-day rotation on an oil tanker, and should have been somewhere between Japan and the Persian Gulf, riding on top of a million and a quarter barrels of crude oil.

"It's a sad story," he said, "often told." He had joined the ship in Singapore, made one trip to the Gulf, then back to Japan. In Japan a replacement crew of Indians had come aboard, and the American crew had packed their bags and flown back to the United States.

To anyone familiar with the American Merchant Marine, this story is absolutely familiar.

In order to maximize profits, shipping companies "flag-out" American vessels. A ship is taken out of American registry, and transferred to a "flag of convenience" country such as Panama or Liberia. This frees the owner to hire cheap foreign sailors and avoid strict regulations. It also allows them to avoid being held accountable for spills and accidents.

What makes this very familiar ritual worthy of notice is the history of the ship in question. Lately she's been known as the SeaRiver Mediterranean as she plied the world's oceans. But at her launch in 1986, her stack was painted with the overlaid Xs that are the insignia of Exxon. On her stern she bore the name Exxon Valdez.

The Valdez was built to carry oil from the port of Valdez, Alaska. Valdez is the southern end of the pipeline carrying oil from Alaska's North Slope oil fields. When the pipeline opened in 1977 it created demand for a whole class of new tankers to carry the oil to West Coast ports. They had to be American-flag ships.

The great protector of the American sailor is called the "Jones Act of 1928," a protectionist law intended to help the American Merchant Marine. It requires that any ship operating in "Intracoastal trade" must be American-flagged, built, and crewed.

Because of the Jones Act a ship carrying crude between two American ports such as Valdez and San Francisco must be an American vessel. A ship carrying crude from Venezuela to Texas can be flag of convenience ships.

Lots of Mainers sail in the crews of these ships. With only a minute's thought I can name a dozen people who live within 10 miles of Belfast who make or made their living in tankers. These high-paid jobs are the traditional occupation of Mainers.

Three years after her launch, the Valdez went aground leaving Valdez. Ten million gallons of crude oil spilled out of her hull before they brought other ships alongside and salvaged the remaining 42 million gallons.

In the great clamor that followed Congress passed a law called OPA 90 which created many new regulations. Drug testing became a constant preoccupation of the Coast Guard, even though the only drug associated with the spill was alcohol. Double-hulled ships are now mandated for carrying petroleum cargoes, even though if the Valdez had been double-hulled instead of single she would have spilled more oil, not less.

At the same time a law specifically targeted the Valdez, banning her from Alaska forever.

This bit of Old Testament retribution was conveniently aimed at the big target, the ship, and ignored the real target, the humans who run the ships and set the policies that control the crews. The Valdez had several sister ships, and they were not banned from anywhere, which suggests that there was no fault in the ship's design.

Exxon is a modern corporation, and did not like to see its Exxon brand and the overlaid X trademark degraded by pictures of the stricken ship, her stack emblazoned with the "double cross." So they set up a holding company named SeaRiver, and transferred all their ships into it. The next time one gets in trouble the stack insignia won't be a huge negative advertisement. At the same time they changed the name of the Exxon Valdez to SeaRiver Mediterranean.

Even with a name change, she couldn't load in Valdez, so after repairs the ship was sent first to the Mediterranean, then later was put into trade between the Persian Gulf and Japan, Singapore and Australia. According to people who sailed on her she had a good safety record and didn't spill oil. Compared to thrashing up to Alaska in winter conditions, sailing the Indian Ocean is quite peaceful, and the Mediterranean was a popular ship with Exxon sailors.

But now that's over. The American fleet shrinks by one, and layoffs may follow. The ship will spend the rest of her life in the foreign-flag fleet, until they decide to scrap her.

This is another familiar story. When talking to sailors about where they went on a ship it often ends with the line, "then we took one last load of oil to Singapore and rode her to the beach."

"The Beach" is a general term for the ship-breaking yards in Pakistan and Bangladesh.

The empty ship is run up on the sand, and swarms of workers cut her up to supply the steel mills of Japan, China and Korea. The workers are paid $3 a day, and if they're injured that's too bad. Toxic wastes are spilled all over, but that's not a problem because Pakistan's environmental regulations are just this side of nonexistent.

The point of the story is not immediately clear. It's how the world works now.

Outsourcing comes home to Maine. The moral, on the other hand, is perfectly obvious, best expressed by paraphrasing a Willie Nelson song: "Mamas, don't let your babies grow up to be sailors, don't let 'em sail tankers, and drive them old tugs, make 'em be telephone mark'ters and such."